immanence

I just discovered the video blog Cinema Poetry, which has collected twenty (so far) of the most remarkable scenes in the history of cinema.

The first of the two ride films below, the Lumiere brothers’ rickshaw film from an Indochinese village, is beautiful (watch it in full screen with the sound turned all the way up):

This makes good viewing alongside Sean Cubitt’s description of cinematic firstness, which he calls “the pixel” in The Cinema Effect.

Kvond’s “great scenes” suggestion of a wonderful clip from “Andrei Rublev” (starting at 3’24”) reminded me of Yuri Illienko’s brilliant camerawork in one of my favorite films, Sergei Paradjanov’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.” Cinema Poetry includes a scene from that, but here’s another:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL1vkMvDS2c&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0

There are moments like this in the film where the camera swirls around as if it were the eye of a tornado, or alternatively as if it were the tornado circling around the eye. What would Deleuze call this? The spiral-image? It’s not quite Michael Snow’s La région centrale”, but it’s heading in that direction. (Snow’s specially constructed camera swings, swirls, twists, and circles around for a couple of hours, like Emerson’s transparent eyeball gone wild in the subarctic tundra of northern Quebec…)

Illienko’s “A Forest Song” (Lisova Pisnia: Mavka) is full of that kind of delirious camerawork (unlike Snow, integrated into the narrative). Unfortunately all I can find of it online is a poor copy of what appears to be the whole thing chopped into segments, dubbed into Russian with no subtitles. See also his Eve of Ivan Kupalo, perhaps the peak of Ukrainian magic realism.